A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

This is the official authorized biography of musician and vintner Maynard James Keenan, the enigmatic vocalist for Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer. Co-author Sarah Jensen's 30-year friendship with Keenan gives her unique insight into his history and career trajectory. The book traces Keenan's journey from his Midwest childhood to his years in the army to his time in art school, from his stint at a Boston pet shop to his place in the international spotlight and his influence on contemporary music and regional winemaking.

Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament

Edgewood - which is not found on any map - is many houses, all put inside each other or across each other. It’s filled with and surrounded by mystery and enchantment; the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Smoky Barnable, who has fallen in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, travels from the City on foot to Edgewood, her family home. There he finds himself on the magical border of an otherworld.

Jerusalem

Alan Moore channels both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein through the hardscrabble streets and alleys of his hometown of Northampton, UK. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative, among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening.

Norse Mythology

Neil Gaiman has long been inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction. Now he turns his attention back to the source, presenting a bravura rendition of the great northern tales. In Norse Mythology, Gaiman fashions primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds; delves into the exploits of the deities, dwarves, and giants; and culminates in Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods and the rebirth of a new time and people.

Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind

Less than fifty thousand years ago mankind had no art, no religion, no sophisticated symbolism, no innovative thinking. Then, in a dramatic and electrifying change, described by scientists as "the greatest riddle in human history," all the skills and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves appeared already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers.

The Anubis Gates

When Brendan Doyle is flown from America to London to give a lecture on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, little does he expect that he will soon be traveling through time and meeting the poet himself. But Brendan could do without being stranded penniless in the teeming, thieving London of 1810.

Dive into the mysteries of Area X, a remote and lush terrain that has inexplicably sequestered itself from civilization. Twelve expeditions have gone in, and not a single member of any of them has remained unchanged by the experience - for better or worse.

Serpent of Light: Beyond 2012

Every 13,000 years on Earth a sacred and secret event takes place that changes everything. Mother Earth's Kundalini energy emerges from its resting place in the planet's core and moves like a snake across the surface of our world. Once at home in ancient Lemuria, it moved to Atlantis, then to the Himalayan mountains of India and Tibet, and with every relocation changed our idea of what spiritual means. And gender. And heart. This time, with much difficulty, the Serpent of Light has moved to the Andes Mountains of Chile and Peru.

Navigators of Dune

The story line tells the origins of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood and its breeding program, the human-computer Mentats, and the Navigators (the Spacing Guild), as well as a crucial battle for the future of the human race, in which reason faces off against fanaticism. These events have far-reaching consequences that will set the stage for Dune, millennia later.

Survivor

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult, is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid-and-collagen-packed media messiah.

Zero K

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Since its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell's revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In this book, Campbell outlines the Hero's Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world's mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.

14

There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much. At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment. And Tim’s. And Veek’s.

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.

Lovecraft Country: A Novel

Critically acclaimed cult novelist Matt Ruff makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.

The Shadow of the Torturer: The Book of the New Sun, Book 1

The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume epic, the tale of a young Severian, an apprentice to the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession - showing mercy towards his victim.

Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun" is one of speculative fiction's most-honored series. In a 1998 poll, Locus Magazine rated the series behind only "The Lord of the Rings" and The Hobbit as the greatest fantasy work of all time.

Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. One of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is immediately drawn to his teacher's fierce intellect and sense of discipline.

The Big Sleep

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

Infinite Jest

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

All the King's Men

The fictionalized account of Louisiana's colorful and notorious governor, Huey Pierce Long, All the King's Men follows the startling rise and fall of Willie Stark, a country lawyer in the Deep South of the 1930s. Beset by political enemies, Stark seeks aid from his right-hand man Jack Burden, who will bear witness to the cataclysmic unfolding of this very American tragedy.

The Buried Giant: A Novel

"You've long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay..."The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years. Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

In a prosperous yet gruesomely violent near future, superhero vigilantes battle thugs whose heads are full of supervillain fantasies. The peace is kept by a team of smooth, well-dressed negotiators called The Men in Fancy Suits. Meanwhile a young girl is caught in the middle and thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. Zoey, a recent college graduate with a worthless degree, makes a reluctant trip into the city after hearing that her estranged con artist father died in a mysterious yet spectacular way.

The Brotherhood of the Wheel

In AD 1119, a group of nine crusaders became known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon - a militant monastic order charged with protecting pilgrims and caravans traveling on the roads to and from the Holy Land. In time, the Knights Templar would grow in power and, ultimately, be laid low. But a small offshoot of the Templars endure and have returned to the order's original mission: to defend the roads of the world and guard those who travel on them.

Publisher's Summary

Is there more than one history of the world? This is the question Pierce Moffett is seeking to answer when, jilted and newly jobless, he gets off a bus by chance in the Faraway Hills and steps unawares into a story that has been awaiting him there. His search will bring him into contact with Rosie Rasmussen, another seeker marked by loss. And it will lead them both on a path toward the longed-for country of our oldest dreams and most unanswerable desires, toward a magnificent discovery.

What the Critics Say

"A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique." (New York Times Book Review) "Aegypt is a must....Crowley [is] an original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by the likes of Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies." (San Francisco Chronicle) "Affecting, cerebral, surprising and delightful, this extraordinary philosophical romance suggests an unlikely but thriving marriage between a writer like Anne Tyler and one such as Jorge Luis Borges." (Publishers Weekly)

Crowley develops his stories slowly with lots of detail and writes beautifully. His writing and ideas are meant to be savored and pondered. If you like the idea of listening to a 15 hour and 29 minute narrative poem, with another poem inside it, then you might well like this book.

Crowley narrates the book himself, in a flat middle-American voice, with a quirky, slightly self-conscious manner. The narration worked for me. I found his voice easy to listen to, and his reading gave me more insight into what his artistic intentions are. But the narration isn't going to please everybody.

If your idea of a good book on spirituality is the Davinci Code or The Celestine Prophecy than this book is not likely for you. If on the other hand you are a lover of the great books and look to Shakespeare for spirituality than Crowley will not disappoint. A book that tries to make magic something more than new-age spirituality, to reawaken the weight and power it once possessed.

Here are worlds within worlds, stories with stories, a 15th century Dominican Monk, a young Will Shakespeare, a crowd of likeable 1970's types. The text does ramble, but the reachings are enjoyable, often poetic, many times profound. I love the combination of authorial ambition and accessibility, novel history and philosophical magical realism. Because it is stories within stories, it was difficult, sometimes, to follow the leap from real time text to the fictions or histories that the protagonists themselves were reading. (This is not a problem with the hard copy.) I was tempted to give it 4 stars for that reason, but I so enjoyed hearing Crowley read and and the book has staying power for me, so 5 stars it is. I'm glad I own it because I will listen to it again.

I was sold on the thesis of the book concerning alternate histories. Unfortunately, John Crowley lost me somewhere in the badlands of his plot. This book is an ambitious effort at corraling a wild and free, open range idea. But that mustang remains on the loose for me. When I read reviews of the book's sequels, critics warn that the author hit his high mark in Aegypt. Adios John. Your lasso flew way over my head.

My first time through, i grew restless with this book. I kept finding moments of brilliance though. Enough for me to finish, but not enough for me to care much for it.

After a growing interest in psychology, cosmology, existentialism, solipsism and neurology, among the other complex themes of Aegypt, i decided to revisit it and see how it would resonate. Needless to say, it inspired me to write this review and I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the greater questions of life

Of course, this is a challenging read (or listen) and Crowley's writing may seem tedious at first. The layers of synchronicity, subtext, historical 'facts' and allegories, etc. require his level of detail. Some fore knowledge of the subject mater would help as well, but this book might actually be a good place to start, if for nothing else than to see if John Crowley's fascination with the world doesn't inspire your own.

I cannot recommend this one highly enough. It has a somewhat opaque beginning, but stick with it! This is really not a very "difficult" book (or audiobook).

John Crowley's novels have often fallen through the crack between "serious" literary fiction and science fiction/fantasy. This novel (which has just been republished under the author's preferred title, "The Solitudes") is the first in a tetrology (still collectively called "Aegypt"). I can't say enough about it. It's a novel of ideas that contains interesting and believable characters. It is somewhat Pynchonesque (and has numerous Pynchon references for the Pynchonati) but is more humanistic in its orientation than Pynchon tends to be. And, despite what other reviewers have written, the author does an excellent job reading his own work. I only hope that Crowley provides us with audiobooks of the rest of the tetrology in the future!

This is the first audio book I can honestly say I didn't like. To say it was confusing and disjointed is understatement. While I am sure it was a deep an mysterious observation on life and human existence, it was beyond me.

Pierce Moffat is a man who lives in one reality while experiencing another. As he reviews his life he realizes that this “feeling” he inhabits has become his central focus. He begins to see that every event and action of his life has been leading him toward this realization. He looks to the horizon and the Far Away Hills, a mystical landscape on the border lands of the two realities. He examines his feeling of time in contrast to his perception of it. He senses a hidden story of the world and wonders how he might uncover it. Gradually he learns to accept and to submit to the flow events and trusts that he will be exactly where he needs to be in order to manifest this perplexing experience. We learn about the writer Fellowes Kraft a man to whom Pierce’s destiny is manifestly bound and who through whom we are introduced to the remarkable Giordano Bruno and the wonderful metaphysician Dr Dee. Then there are the women in Pierce’s life who somehow hold the key to unraveling Pierce’s sense of things. This book is categorized as “Fantasy”, but this is misleading for Aeygpt is really an allegory about an experience of reality that might be called “Intuitive”. This is a tradition with a long pedigree, one that has operated alongside all the mainstream religious belief systems while remaining largely hidden. We might find a sense of this in Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and in the Rosicrucian traditions to name but a few. There are some difficulties with this novel and the Audio production. Aeygpt is the first in a four book cycle, and therefore the spot on which this remarkable and highly talented writer has laid a detailed foundation, be patient as the form does eventually begin to take shape. Also, the writer is the narrator and his style does take a little getting used to. Finally, this book is a wonderful gift to those whose seek to raise their sight beyond the accepted truths. Persevere and you will be astonished.

Where does Aegypt rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I've only listened to two books, this being the second. I can't choose between it and Jerusalem by Alan Moore. Both are top notch novels, to say the very least, and wonderful narration performances.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Aegypt?

Ha! It's all great. I particularly like the novel's digressions into fictional/historical chapters.

What does John Crowley bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I love his easy, folksy narration, and the inflection he brings to small dialogue exchanges. I hope he narrates more of his books in the future.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I would have listened to it all if I could. I use the audiobooks on my rather arduous travel to one of my jobs (2 hours plus each day). It makes a molasses traffic trawl delightful.

Any additional comments?

There are three other books in the Aegypt Quartet, so now naturally I am wishing I could listen to those too. As Aegypt (AKA The Solitudes) was published as an audiobook back in 2007, subsequent narrated volumes seem to be wishful thinking. But there is always another of his astonishing works on offer: LITTE,BIG. Also narrated by Crowley himself. I can't wait to dig into that.

This is by far my most treasured audible possession, and I have been a member for several years now. The story, the reading, both are flawless! I hope Mr. Crowley will eventually record audio versions for the remaining three books. Until then I am eagerly awaiting the upcoming release of his masterpiece--Little, Big on audible.

This novel (now re-named 'The Solitudes') is the first book in John Crowley's Aegypt quartet (the others - 'Love and Sleep\"; 'Daemonomania'; 'Endless Things' don't seem to be available as audio books yet, but can be bought in paperback). The four books really need to be read as one long novel, and what a wonderful experience that is, this is one of the great undiscovered masterpieces of modern American writing. The novel weaves together the stories of Pierce Moffett, a failing academic who is about to be taught a few things about life; John Dee the Elizabethan magus; and Giordano Bruno, Renaissance philosopher. At once a fascinating history lesson about Renaissance occult thought (if ever a book deserved to be called the Da Vinci Code for grown ups it is this); a gnostic parable; and a moving and powerful psychological tale of self transformation. The audio book is read by the author himself in a low key, deadpan style which works very well with the story.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

N. Price

12/7/07

Overall

"A beautiful reading of a great modern novel"

John Crowley delivers a sensitive and affecting reading of the first volume of his masterpiece, 'The Aegypt Quartet'. This is quite one of the best things I've heard on Audible.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Sydney

London, United Kingdom

11/15/09

Overall

"Great writer not so strong on reading"

Crowley's "Little, Big" is one of my favorite books so I jumped at the chance to hear Aegypt, which I hadn't read. I enjoyed this but I might try approaching it again in print-- I kept having to go back and listen to sections again because I couldn't quite follow what was happening. His style which is very oblique and poetical would have benefited from a professional reader-- the author does the reading himself, and while he does a good job the sound of the prose is maybe too essential to the book to leave it to a non-actor. If you like "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" you might give this a chance; it's similar in a sort of gentle, hippie-ish modern-day way.

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

Victoria Pye

Worcestershire, England

5/16/09

Overall

"Unsure how I feel."

I did enjoy this book but it was very hard work. I found the 'free love' feel of the modern storyline sat very strangely with its philosophical ramblings. I have a feeling that perhaps I may enjoy the next one more now that the characters are set. (Presuming it contains the same characters). Cannot give the heartfelt praise of other reviewers.

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

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